At this rate, between North Korea, Charlottesville and the climate crisis, it's unclear if America can survive being too much "greater", as the political cartoonists in PDiddie's latest weekly collection illustrate...

IN TODAY'S RADIO REPORT: California dodges a bullet --- for the moment --- at Oroville Dam; U.S. not prepared for climate impacts on infrastructure; Judge rejects tribe's request to halt Dakota Access Pipeline construction; PLUS: Extreme heat waves brings extreme fire danger to Australia... All that and more in today's Green News Report!

On today's BradCast, we catch up on a lot of news, polls, twists and turns --- most of which underscore, yet again, why elections and representative democracy matter...no matter what the corporate "news" media tries to tell ya.

Among the stories covered on today's thrilling episode!...

New polls find, once again, that Bernie Sanders leads Hillary Clinton in match-ups against allpotential Republican opponents (and even among Democrats nationally); Also, that the front-runners in each party are remarkably unpopular within their own parties.

Bruce Springsteen cancels a North Carolina concert Sunday due to the state Republicans' new pro-discrimination law;

The GOP in Nebraska is attempting to 'swipe' a potential electoral college vote from Democrats;

San Francisco (where the economy is booming, as it is elsewhere here in California, now under Democratic control), becomes the first U.S. city to mandate paid parental leave;

More clear evidence that thinking big about policies and progressive ideas pays off when the people bother to fight for them and turn out to vote (when they are allowed to vote, anyway), rather than turn cynical and stay home.

All of that and much much more on today's program, including new evidence that the Keystone pipeline leak in South Dakota is far worse than originally reported by TransCanada, the company which owns it, and Desi Doyen joins us with the latest Green News Report which also includes some very encouraging news today...

While we post The BradCast here every day, and you can hear it across all of our great affiliate stations and websites, to automagically get new episodes as soon as they're available sent right to your computer or personal device, subscribe for free at iTunes, Stitcher, TuneIn or our native RSS feed!

Romm, who served as Chief Science Adviser for last year's Emmy-award winning Years of Living Dangerously series on Showtime, also breaks a bit of news on The BradCast by confirming that there will be a season two for the groundbreaking environmental documentary series. He promises that "it will be on a cable network that has a far greater reach" than Showtime, though he can't let us know which one yet.

IN TODAY'S RADIO REPORT: Get out your popcorn - Climate change-denying Sen. Ted Cruz is running for president...and Gov. Jerry Brown is unimpressed; Is mandatory water rationing in California's future?; PLUS: In Florida, don't say 'climate change' or you be sent to a mental hospital....All that and more in today's Green News Report!

Out here in California --- for those of us now living directly "on the front edge of a climate crisis", as MSNBC's Chris Hayes describes it in the interview below --- it's both extraordinarily unusual and incredibly welcome to hear a politician with ambitions for higher office speak as frankly as Lt. Gov. Gavin Newsom (D) does here.

Newsom describes the state's voluntarily water conservation measures to date, in the face of our record-shattering drought, as "small ball".

"I think we're going to have to move to mandatory rationing," he notes bluntly. Hayes appears surprised in response, noting that calls for mandatory rationing are "essentially anathema in American political vocabulary."

"This is serious," Newsom responds in turn, detailing the crisis the state is now facing. "This is Code Red".

"We can call for voluntary rationing because that polls better, or we can lead. And I guess at the end of the day, we have to ask ourselves 'Are we just stewards? Or are we gonna step up and step in and actually share our private thoughts --- trust me, private thoughts are ample around some requirements for mandatory reductions --- or we can continue to play the finger in the wind politics that, frankly, has put us in this crisis in the first place."